If a harmless photo of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull nursing his grandchild while holding a beer can create a social media storm you know you are living in a country taking itself far too seriously.

Wake up Australia. You need to lighten up.

Say what you like about the PM – most do – but during his working hours recently he has been tackling issues as stressful as trying to help save the free world from the threat of nuclear war from North Korea.

Nuclear wars are major issues. Quiet beers at the football while nursing your granddaughter is not.

Yet on social media yesterday they were causing roughly as much concern as each other with some users outraged that the Prime Minister was “breathing grog’’ all over his granddaughter.

Dear oh dear. Just as well social media was not around in the days of Bob Hawke, who famously loved a beer before be became PM. Goodness knows how many innocent children back then suffered from the curse of the beer-breathed ACTU leader.

Where are those children now? Did they even survive? Anyone for a senate inquiry?

We might as well launch one, for this is what Australia is becoming.

Australians luxuriate in our reputation as the land of knockabouts and larrikins, the one which produced outlaws who became legends such as Ned Kelly and laid-back comedy stars like Paul Hogan.

But the reality is we are turning into the sort of country we used to take the mickey out of.

For more than two centuries Australia has mocked our English forefathers as “whingeing Poms’’ and proudly noted that while they are known for stiff upper lips, we are a less formal go-with-the flow nation.

Well we used to be. Social media has changed that. Now everything is a drama.

Turnbull had every right to cuddle his granddaughter at the football while having a beer. But politics being politics, our bet is he will read the vicious feedback and won’t do it again if his Sydney Swans reach the AFL grand final.

One nuclear threat at a time is enough for any Prime Minister.
The laidback Aussie image is changing as we become a nation of knockers and whingers | The Courier-Mail

• Pauline Hanson wears a burqa in the Senate
• James Campbell: Fancy dress shows pointless politics of fear
• Susie O’Brien: How Pauline’s own stunt proved her wrong
• Brandis attacks Hanson’s move to wear burqa in Senate
• Malcolm Roberts’ passionate but confusing defence of Pauline Hanson

But the reaction to it from our political elite — huffsters like Attorney-General George Brandis — is what scares me more.

Labor and Greens senators shouted “shame” and “you’re a disgrace” as Hanson hovered in and asked Brandis if the Government would ban the burqa, at least in Parliament.

As Hanson later noted, not a single security guard had asked to see her face.

And as she also noted, the burqa has been banned from public areas not just in European countries like France, Belgium and Italy, but also in Muslim ones like Malaysia.

She has a point here, and that’s even without considering the burqa is also a shameful symbol of the subjugation of women, blotting them out of the public space.

You’d actually expect Labor and the Greens — normally fast to denounce sexism — to denounce the burqa, too.

Instead we got the same overheated damnation of Hanson that will convince many Australians she is in fact one of the few politicians with the guts to call things by their proper name.

But George Brandis is not.

Brandis should note well that by the end of his speech attacking Hanson’s stunt he got a standing ovation from the Greens and Labor, but none from his own side.

In fact, barely half the Liberal and Nationals Senators even clapped, and here’s why.

First, Brandis — and Senators of the Left — savaged Hanson for wearing a burqa, but many voters would know these same MPs would have applauded the “courage” of a Muslim MP wearing that alienating sack.

Second, Brandis dangerously elevated the burqa as an important symbol of Islam — a “religious garment”.

Labor’s Penny Wong was as bad, praising the wearing of the burqa as a “sincere act of faith”.

That’s troubling.

Apologists used to claim the burqa was just a backward tribal thing that did not represent nice and sweet Islam at all. But now it apparently does.

Third, Brandis, voice cracking with emotion, then got to the heart of his problem with Hanson’s burqa, and this is not just troubling but alarming.

“It has been the advice of each Director-General of security … and each Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police with whom I have worked that it is vital for their intelligence and law enforcement work that they work cooperatively with the Muslim community,” he blustered.

“To ridicule that community, to drive it into a corner, to mock its religious garments is an appalling thing to do.”

Let me translate: do not mock or criticise the burqa or more Muslims will attack us.

Sorry, but I don’t want us cowed by such threats. The burqa is an abomination, and no threats should stop me from asserting this feminist truth.

Does anyone tell gay activists to stop dressing up as nuns or Christians may blow us up?

What Brandis has in fact said is that Muslims are dangerous, and the burqa represents them.

I hope Brandis is just exaggerating the extremism of most Muslims.

But I certainly know he’s kowtowing to a radical minority who want their women bagged and hidden from view.

That is unacceptable.

What Hanson says is not so important. But what is said by Hanson’s powerful critics — that’s what really has me worried.

Andrew Bolt: Worrying response to Pauline Hanson’s burqa stunt | Herald Sun